


Oh Precious Gift

by jessie_pie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Christmas fic, Gen, Humor, Mpreg, Pre-Series, Short, Sort of mpreg in a non-typical sense, Truly Weird Christmas fic, Way Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 22:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5514878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessie_pie/pseuds/jessie_pie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe it’s family. Maybe it’s hope. Maybe it’s freedom.<br/>But however you define it, it definitely was not given quietly.</p>
<p>Or, if there’s an Anti-Christ, there’s got to be a Christ, too.<br/>(Please check end notes for content warnings.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oh Precious Gift

“I have made a very important discovery!”  
Michael froze. He got messages over angel radio all the time, but he hadn’t heard that voice for millennia.  
“Gabriel? You’re alive?”  
An agonizing pause filled with crackling static, then: “Uh… yes… sort of… for now.”  
The sudden swelling of hope was replaced by the clenching sensation of terror.“Cease to conceal your location, and I will aid you immediately.”  
“I’m not hiding that. Can’t hide much right now.”  
Michael ignored Gabriel’s abysmal and cryptic attempt at humor, concentrated on the transmitted coordinates and….  
Appeared.  
He was beneath a dusky sky in a miserable patch of land humans were currently calling Judea. More specifically, he was on the outskirts of the village of Bethlehem, standing between two low mud brick buildings, one of which backed into a hill. Michael had materialized a few yards away from Gabriel’s location, wanting to assess the situation rather than diving in blindly. Anything that endangered Gabriel’s existence was a serious threat. He had expected, at least, a horde of demons. Gabriel, though irresponsible, was still an archangel.  
Instead, he was on a quiet hillside. There were no signs of pitched battle, no roars or screams or stinking trails of blood. Michael’s eyes narrowed. Maybe it was too quiet. He strode toward the mud hut that was broadcasting his brother’s location. He’d barely moved for the last few seconds. Hardly the actions of a valiant warrior. Michaels’ fears were amplified by a stifled groan emanating through the thick walls. He flung open the weathered door, nearly tearing the painted wooden slats from their hinges.  
And stared into the dark stable.  
There were no demons, or renegade angels, or improbably escaped leviathan. In fact, the only supernatural thing in the room was Gabriel himself.  
He was occupying a young female vessel with a vastly distended abdomen and was lying on a heap of straw in the middle of the floor. Three humans, a middle-aged man, an older woman and an adolescent boy who Michael supposed from the relatively lower quality of his clothing was some sort of servant, huddled into a corner.  
“What,” Michael demanded, “is going on here?”  
The man and the woman looked like they might say something, but thought better of it. Gabriel, unsurprisingly, was the one to break the silence. “Long time no see, big bro,” he said with a sickly smile. “Miss me?”  
“What have you done?” Michael snarled between clenched teeth, cracking two of his vessel’s molars in the process.  
“What does it look like?” Gabriel groaned, gesturing at his swollen belly.  
“You didn’t,” Michael hissed.  
“It’s not a tapeworm,” Gabriel shrugged.  
“You know that is forbidden,” Michael glowered, undeterred by his brother’s crude humor. Even after a two-thousand year break, he still remembered the best strategy for dealing with Gabriel: ignore it and keep on going.  
Behind his back some of the humans shrugged and whispered in evident confusion, before slowly spreading out from their huddle, the older woman cautiously approaching the feuding pair. Evidently they had decided that Michael really was the pregnant woman’s brother and, not an immediate threat, even though he sounded patently insane  
“You could be kinder to your dying sibling, you know,” Gabriel said tragically.  
“You’re not dying,” Michael snapped. To his surprise, the woman with the greying hair said the same thing, albeit in a much less irritated tone.  
“You said you’d made a very important discovery,” Michael reminded him, partially because he wanted to know why his brother had summoned him, and partially to distract him from rolling on the floor to a chanted accompaniment of “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.” However immersed Gabriel had decided to become in his vessel’s biological processes, he unfortunately hadn’t acquired the need to breathe.  
He accomplished about half of his goal.  
“I’ve discovered why this is a bad idea!” Gabriel declared with a triumphant gesture.  
Michael ground his teeth, shattering a premolar. The real miracle here wasn’t that Gabriel had tried something as phenomenally stupid as begetting a neither-angel-nor-human freak in his vessel’s womb, it was that he could go from terrified for his brother’s well-being to nearly ready to strangle him in a matter of minutes. He had always thought that Father had been too soft on his youngest sibling. Now that he had finally tracked him down, he might finally have a chance to rectify that.  
“Hold my hand, Michael, it’s unbearable!” Gabriel interrupted his train of thought by attempting to make his hand go the same way as his teeth. “Please tell me it’s nearly over,” he added, rolling his eyes wildly. “I can’t take much more.”  
“First labors take a long time.” Michael hadn’t noticed the woman standing quietly by Gabriel’s side, but he didn’t consider it a lapse. She was only human, after all, and even in the prime of life would hardly constitute a threat. As it was, she was probably in her fifties, with a thin frame and deep lines on her face. She was about the least threatening creature he could imagine. She knelt before Gabriel, lifting the hem of his coarse reddish robes. “You’re nowhere close.”  
“I’m going to have to suffer like this for hours?” Gabriel wailed.  
Michael had just had the same thought. He briefly considered teleporting the abomination out of his brother’s womb, then dragging him off to Heaven, but decided against it. Such hybrids were forbidden because they were so powerful, and to make matters worse, it was conjectured that their mental development roughly paralleled that of a human- which meant Gabriel was harboring a big ball of panicky instinct, ready to go off at the slightest poke. Michael’s teleportation could be the equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb at close range, which would mean goodbye Little Town of Bethlehem. Not that Michael particularly cared. Humans were like weeds; pull out one patch and another would pop up. His only objection was that being on the receiving end of a point-blank nuclear blast, while not exactly harmful to a being of his stature, would definitely give him the angelic equivalent of a splitting headache. Besides, Michael thought bitterly, Gabriel needed to learn that actions had consequences and you couldn’t just run away from everything. With that in mind, he sat down heavily on the straw beside his brother.  
“Then you’ve decided not to abandon me in my hour of need,” Gabriel said mawkishly, wiping a tear from his vessel’s eye. “You really do care.”  
“Gabriel, shut up. If you’d listened to my advice in the first place, we wouldn’t be here now,” Michael said through gritted teeth, allowing a pulse of power to travel the length of his jaw. It wasn’t that he was fond of the vessel, it was just that he needed some intact teeth if he intended to speak to his incorrigible brother or the primitive creatures he had unaccountably chosen to associate with.  
“Oh, and what advice was that? Just hang out and watch you and Luci go at each other’s throats until Dad threw one of you into the Cage? Or the whole buck up and suck up spiel after Dad went AWOL?” Gabriel asked peevishly. “And,” he hissed in an undertone that forced Michael to bend closer to hear. “Don’t call me that Gabriel. I’m on the down-low. It’s Mary here.  
“Of course, he knows something’s up.” Gabriel indicated the older of the two men, who seemed to be in about the same state of shock as he had been on Michael’s entrance.  
Michael quickly scanned the man’s aura. He might be a prophet or a psychic; he could have missed that in his initial inspection. There were no anomalies in the energy around the man. He was completely normal.  
“Why does he know anything?” Michael hissed, unconsciously copying his brother’s volume.  
“I had to tell him something when I sprouted this beastly lump! I’m too young for my figure to go.”  
Michael still looked clueless.  
Gabriel sighed huffily. Michael loved to put on the superior older brother act, but it wasn’t even a decent charade. He hadn’t bothered to learn the first little thing about humans. In fact, he had probably deliberately avoided it. So much for Dad’s “Be nice to your new siblings” speech.  
“He’s my husband. My betrothed, technically,” Gabriel whispered conspiratorially. “Steady job- carpenter. Would be union if they had unions here. Wonder if the Romans will be changing that?  
“He thinks it’s a miraculous virgin birth- which it is.” Gabriel added the last bit as Michael’s brows knit into an angry thundercloud and he looked ready to deliver an irritable objection.  
Gabriel’s insistence did nothing to change his brother’s opinion, which, Michael thought, could be the reason why he found his hand seized in a vice grip as Gabriel screamed: “Contraction! Laudanum, iocane, something! Oh God, another contraction!”  
“Breathe through it,” the woman advised steadily.  
“Why’s she so calm about this?” Michael demanded in an undertone.  
Gabriel was too busy panting dramatically to answer him, but the woman must have had sharper ears than he thought, because she replied: “I have had five children of my own. I am very familiar with the birthing process.”  
“You’re not a midwife?” Michael was surprised enough that he momentarily forgot to address the human woman with the appropriate derision. It wasn’t that he was concerned for his brother’s wellbeing; nothing short of an angel blade could harm him, and he probably wasn’t even in any pain. It was just that he found it hard to imagine his brother settling for less than the best, even when he only had meager human options to choose from.  
Then again, “the best” probably wasn’t a building that was mostly an extension of a shallow cave and smelled strongly of donkeys.Michael felt discomfited. As far as he could tell, there were two options: either Gabriel had some grandiose plan he had neglected to tell his brother about or there was no plan at all.  
The first option, at first brush, seemed far more probable. Gabriel was a born schemer, as Michael had found time and time again, much to his chagrin. For the first billion years after the formation of Earth, Gabriel had been constantly encouraging him to take a peek down these interesting hollow mountains or convincing him that the Moon was a better property to invest in since it was, after all, closer to the sun (at least sometimes), until Michael finally cottoned on and ignored his brother in favor of what he was actually good at: military strategy. But since the evolution of supposedly intelligent life, Gabriel’s plans had tended to involve massive palaces, hordes of elephants and droves of beautiful maidens. Here, they were hitting maybe one out of three, which, little as Michael liked to admit it, made the second option seem more likely. But that would imply that Gabriel was genuinely inconvenienced by a simplistic human process he had deliberately subjected himself to, which was so absurd that it in turn implied that this was all some sort of trick, which meant that Gabriel had a plan after all. Probably.  
It took Michael about a millisecond to work this all out which, in his opinion, meant he was finally starting to understand how his brother’s demented mind functioned. However, by then the woman in the olive robes was speaking, forcing him to divert a minuscule fraction of his attention from trying to deduce Gabriel’s plan.  
“I am Abigail, the innkeeper’s wife. We sent Eli, our servant, to try and find a midwife, but-”  
The youth interrupted her. Michael didn’t like either of them- they were, after all, human- but he was tempted to adhere the boy’s tongue to the roof of his mouth for his impertinence. Gabriel somehow managed to painfully crush his fingers just as he was about to gesture. “One of them was at a birth, and I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find the second one. I think she was helping one of the other travelers.”  
“We’re stretched thin with people coming from all over Galilee.” Abigail shook her head.  
Michael was clearly supposed to know what was going on here. He began sifting through Abigail’s mind- she looked like the most intelligent person here, not that that was saying much, but Gabriel apparently noticed, because a sort of humming filled the frequencies that only angels could hear, and Michael found himself suddenly unable to see into the humans’ minds.  
“And in that year, when Quirinius was governor of Syria, a decree went out saying that all the people should be counted. And each went to the city of their ancestors to be counted.” Gabriel said so smoothly he might as well have been reciting.  
Michael scowled. Gabriel, ever the show-off, had to flaunt his paltry knowledge of the pathetic human realm, while he probably had no idea about anything that had happened in Heaven for the past three millennia.  
“You know,” Gabriel whispered conspiratorially, “Joseph’s a descendent of King David. That’s why we had to go to all the way to Bethlehem.”  
There was Gabriel’s tendency to get the best for himself. But that didn’t explain…  
“So what’s a princess like you doing in a donkey-cave like this?”  
“It’s a stable!” Eli, the servant boy, sounded like he thought Michael was crazy.  
“There was no room in the inn!” A surprisingly gravelly voice that Michael realized had to be Joseph.  
“My husband keeps a very nice inn!” Abigail, affronted.  
“Screaming ‘Pregnant woman coming through’ was surprisingly ineffective.” Gabriel, obviously.  
“You didn’t try ‘Archangel coming through’?” Michael asked drily.  
“No, my child is going to have to learn to live as a human after I’m gone,” Gabriel sighed.  
Michael rolled his eyes, utterly sick of his brother’s histrionics. Again, he considered dragging him to Heaven kicking and screaming, and again the prospect of a full-frontal nuclear blast deterred him.

The night wore on. Outside the stable, the moon rose higher and the stars slowly shifted positions in the inky sky. Inside the stable, Gabriel’s contractions became more frequent and, if his histrionics were to be believed, more painful.  
“I’m dying,” he wailed for approximately the five hundredth time.  
“First births are the hardest. You’re doing very well,” Abigail said reassuringly.  
“How long will this take?” Michael asked impatiently. Archangels could usually make things happen as soon they wanted; he was unaccustomed to waiting around for hours. Besides, Gabriel’s head had somehow wound up in his lap, and he was tired of the smell of donkey dung.  
“Your sister is about halfway there.” Abigail’s tone and arched eyebrows suggested she thought Michael was worried about the wrong things.  
Both Gabriel and Michael groaned.  
Gabriel’s steady stream of whimpers gradually turned into a series of yelps, which ultimately became a sound Michael could only describe as yowling, accompanied by writhing on the floor.  
“Gabriel.” Michael had pretty much given up on his vessel’s teeth by now. “You are a being of celestial intent. You are near the pinnacle of God’s Creation. You are supposed to be dignified.”  
“It hurts, it hurts,” Gabriel whined, rocking back and forth as he lay on his side in the divot created by his previous contortions.  
“It is a simple biological process. You are above such things.” Michael prodded Gabriel with his toe, ignoring Abigail’s disapproving glare.  
“You think you could handle it any better?” Gabriel snapped, lunging out and grabbing Michael’s hand with surprising speed.  
A sudden wave of pain cramped Michael’s lower abdomen, and for one dreadful instant, he thought his knees were going to give way.  
“That’s half of what I’m feeling! Half!” Gabriel howled.  
“This- is- not- pleasant, but you can do better,” Michael said through gritted teeth.

Outside, the desert grew cool and foxes and feral dogs rooted through the garbage heaps of Bethlehem while cicadas chirped. Inside, the recessed windows and small gaps between the slats in the door were not enough to prevent the air from growing stagnant and heavy with the smells of livestock, straw, sweat and, increasingly, blood.  
Gabriel’s screams became shriller. The humans, even Abigail, retreated to a corner of the stable that was more craggy rock than worked stone. Michael’s jaw began to ache.  
“Gabriel,” he barked, “Stop screaming in your true voice. You’re frightening the humans.”  
In all honesty, Michael couldn’t care less about the humans. But he knew telling Gabriel to stop because he was giving him a headache would be utterly futile.  
Thankfully, Gabriel’s screams dropped back into the human range.

The contractions were nearly constant now. Soon, Abigail, told Gabriel it would be time to push. Gabriel shook his head. His vessel’s head was cushioned with a rough pillow of straw and some her hair had worked its way free of her linen head-covering, hanging around her face in sweaty ropes. Gabriel squeezed Michael’s hand weakly. “Bury me not on the lonesome prairie…” he murmured.  
“You’re being ridiculous,” Michael reprimanded him. “Besides, you honestly expect me to feel sorry for you when you did this to yourself?”  
“Sorry, wrong century,” Gabriel said vaguely. Then: “It’s getting so dark… Michael, I can hardly see. This is it, the final night rising like a great wave to sweep me off this mortal coil…” He swept his free hand dramatically across his eyes.  
“You can’t see because it’s night, you’re in a stable lit with a few pathetic excuses for oil lamps, and you have your hand over your face,” Michael said in exasperation. “Your juvenile behavior has never been amusing, and if you think that, after only a few thousand years respite, I want to put up with it again, you must have let your brain wither down to the size of these creatures’.” He glared at the humans, then attempted to retrieve his hand, but Gabriel’s grip had suddenly grown vicelike, and he was chanting “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying” with a fervour that all but the most devout prayers would struggle to match.  
“Enough!” The forceful declaration came, unexpectedly, from Abigail. Joseph and Eli, who had been trying to be inconspicuous near the back of the stable, stared, a donkey ceased braying and cautiously turned its long head towards the sharp voice, Michael surprised himself by breaking off his one-sided glaring match with his brother, and even Gabriel allowed his long-lashed eyes to languidly flicker open, feigning, albeit not very convincingly, that he was doing this by chance.  
“You!” Abigail pointed at Michael. Her finger trembled, but her voice was steady. “You are being unnecessarily cruel. I don’t see how you dare treat your own sister this way, especially at a time like this. If you can’t show some basic decency, I will have to ask you to leave.”  
“She’s quite right, you know- a very wise woman.” Gabriel nodded smugly. “I don’t know why I’ve put up with you as long as I have. It must be my gentle, forgiving nature…”  
But Abigail wasn’t done yet.  
“And you,” she rounded on Gabriel, who attempted to sink out of sight by burrowing in the straw, a ridiculous proposition made all the more absurd by his enormous belly. “You are being overly dramatic. You are not dying. I know as well as anyone that birth is neither easy nor painless, but thousands of women from Eve onwards have borne children, and the most of them have done it without such fuss and ruckus. Do you think carrying on so will make this any easier for you or anyone else?”  
“That’s what I’ve been saying this whole time,” Michael whispered, careful not to speak too loudly in case Abigail heard.  
After that, it was “a bit less Axis versus Allies and a bit more Korea glaring at Korea across the DMZ”, as Gabriel put it. No one understood what he meant, but no one asked, either.  
The screams had stopped, but so too had the stream of sarcastic comments. The world seemed reduced to the pattern of contraction, panting, contraction, panting. Gabriel was, Michael decided, still being melodramatic, just in a more subtle way than before. Still though, he found himself glancing surreptitiously up at the thin, worn woman kneeling at his brother’s side. She’d been through this five times?

They were close now. Michael knew it. In the pauses between contractions, he could feel Gabriel reordering his vessel’s synapses, undoing the damage that his tenancy had done. He was preparing to leave. Michael tightened his grip on his brother’s shoulders. The instant Gabriel left his vessel, he would abandon his. He wouldn’t get away this time.  
“When the next pain comes, you must push,” Abigail said firmly.  
Gabriel made a sound that might have been assent, and the way he moved his head could have been a nod. Michael wasn’t really sure.  
He felt Gabriel’s shoulders tense. Another contraction was coming. Abigail knew it, too.  
“Push,” she instructed. “Push.”  
Gabriel’s entire body stiffened and shuddered with effort. His hands clenched into fists, and his nails left red crescents in his palms. Michael glimpsed the top of the baby’s head for a moment before it slid out of view.  
Gabriel was rigid, trembling. He groaned. He groaned with his vessel’s mouth, of course, but Michael could feel the sound shuddering through his entire Grace.  
For the first time Michael considered the possibility that this stupid, biological human process might actually hurt his brother.  
“Again,” Abigail urged. “Push.”  
“You can’t,” Michael insisted, voice rising uncontrollably. “You’ll kill hi- her. Can’t you see she can’t do any more?”  
“She must,” Abigail said plainly and firmly. “There is no choice.”  
Michael had been leaning forward into Abigail’s space, trying to intimidate her. Now he shrunk back, suddenly feeling much smaller than his vessel. She was right. Gabriel had no choice but to deliver to this freak of nature or die trying.  
He braced his brother as the next contraction hit, vaguely hearing Abigail urging Gabriel to push, far more attuned to the spasming of his muscles, the ripping sound, which he swore had to be within the range of human hearing, of muscle fibers beginning to tear from the strain- The baby’s head crowned again, stained dark with blood- Michael couldn’t breathe, forgot that he didn’t need to- Abigail’s jaw was tense.  
“Keep pushing.” Abigail’s voice was exigent. “Keep pushing. Don’t stop now- you’re almost…” The baby’s head suddenly slipped free, and Abigail immediately grabbed it, supporting it from beneath and guiding the shoulders and torso. Michael was unable to look away as, with Gabriel’s efforts and Abigail’s guiding hands, the infant’s curled body emerged. For an instant, they all stared at the baby, human-shaped but, to Michael’s eyes, glowing with a strange radiance that was neither soul nor Grace. Then the baby screamed.  
There was a collective exhalation- and Gabriel’s essence poured from his vessel’s lips, a silvery white light now arcing toward the ceiling.  
“You-” Michael shrieked, realizing in an instant what had happened: Gabriel had tricked him, had used that precious moment of distraction against him. He tore his essence away from his vessel and raced after his brother, but Gabriel was already streaking across the night sky and over the hills of Bethlehem where scattered groups of shepherds exclaimed in terror at the sudden blazing light.  
“Ha-HA!” the light shrieked. “Just try and catch me! Try and catch me, Mikey bro! You’re too late!”

**Author's Note:**

> Supernatural is not the property of this author.  
> This work was kindly beta'd by Osito.  
> Warnings for: Scenes of Labor and Birth, Mentions of nuclear weapons, Mentions of death, Discussion of Imprisonment, Potentially Upsetting Gender Tangles and Screaming.


End file.
